


mechanical parts

by superstarrgirl



Series: patchwork children [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Flashbacks of War, Holocaust Mention, M/M, Mentions of Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 00:57:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10933659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superstarrgirl/pseuds/superstarrgirl
Summary: Maybe here, too, is where their stories intersect. Two men, stumbling blind and lost through whatever world they’ve been thrown into. Different names, different stories. Known as who they are and not who they were. Before the Serum, he was Steve Rogers, a plucky kid from Brooklyn with a sharp tongue and swinging fists to match. Before the Fall, he was Bucky Barnes, a notorious flirt with wide eyes and a quick smile and a tight fist around the upper part of Steve’s jacket.Men are not born monsters. Monsters are made. Graves and monuments and memories are not meant for monsters.(A study on where Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier intersect)





	mechanical parts

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't posted in aaaaaaages! I found this sitting in my folder and decided to finish it! I wasn't truly sure how to finish it. Enjoy!

The first few weeks are hard without the crux of the Winter Soldier to fall back on.

He first sees his face plastered on a billboard somewhere in downtown DC, and has to trace footsteps all the way back to the Air and Space Museum. It’s the first time, standing in front of the Howling Commandos, that he truly remembers who he was before the fall.

Bucky buys the notebook that day, in the gift shop, starts categorizing his life as _Before the Fall_ and _After the Fall_. Before the fall is beautiful women, tiny apartments in Brooklyn, a uniform that doesn’t fit quite right, a group of boys marching off to fight a war that isn’t theirs. After the fall is anger, bright crimson blood, commands, a name he doesn’t recognize, a voice calling him _Bucky_.

Somewhere in both of them, Steve fits in.

Haphazardly, at first – a scrawny kid with swinging fists and a spirit too big for him. At first, he’s family, he’s blood, he’s Bucky’s knight in an American flag. And then he’s a nuisance, a fly to swat, a mission.

In the mirror of his motel, he practices his name. “James – Buchanan – Barnes.” He repeats, over and over again until he starts to feel like not the Soldier anymore, but just Bucky. He doesn’t remember what it was like to be James, because his muscle memory recognizes the Soldier but little else.

“I’m with you till the end of the line.” He says to the mirror, to the shadow of himself.

He cuts his hair with blunt scissors, scrapes up the trimmings and washes them down the drain. He tends to his wounds, to the cuts and bruises, oils and cleans his arm and hides it under long-sleeved shirts and hoodies until he starts to realize that he doesn’t have to be ashamed of it, of his handicap and what came from it.

Before he leaves DC for good, he visits a woman whose name is heavy on his tongue, who blinks at him from her hospital bed and then holds out her thin, papery hand for him to take.

“You were much too brave,” she murmurs, voice hoarse. “You were much too good for this world, James.”

She may never know what he did, who he became. Or maybe she does know, has always known. Peggy was always one step ahead of the rest of them.

He travels a lot – takes up in old motels off highways and walks for miles and miles around unfamiliar cities. Some nights he doesn’t sleep or wakes up panting and gasping for breath or sobbing into his pillow. His first stop is New York, is the apartment block where he and Steve grew up. He wanders the bustling streets of a city he doesn’t know anymore in search of something he knows he won’t find. It’s poetic, in some way, that New York is where Bucky began and where the Soldier will end.

He reads a lot, spends hours in libraries and museums trawling through books and trying to catch up on everything he missed. He reads about Howard Stark and his son, about the organization that Peggy founded. Reads about Steve parading around in a hero’s mask, shield stuck to his back and helmet pulled low and patriotic tunes on his tongue. He learns that Steve was stuck in ice for seventy years, learns that he died doing what he thought was right.

 _That little guy from Brooklyn_ , his own voice whispers. _I’m following him_.

People are looking for him, and so he does what he does best – he disappears. He purchases a one-way flight to London with a fake passport and a fake name and he doesn’t plan on looking back. There’s too much that he’s missed, too much that he’s done, for him to plant his heels in the ground and wait for history to come flooding back. So he goes, and as he does, he writes.

He writes about the people he meets and their celebrations and histories and cultures. He writes that America won the war but lost in more ways than they could count. He writes about history and about crumbled ruins and temples and remnants of war. He writes that a man landed on the moon. He writes movies and shows and music that he has to listen to and watch. He writes foreign words and words that should be familiar but curl strangely on his tongue, stick in the back of his throat like tar. He writes the fifty states seven or eight times, writes that there’s a big expanse of ice that became the last state. He files all of this in his notebook, adds in clippings from newspapers and recipes and drinks that sound funny.

In the back of his notebook are a few pages he’s still unsteady about – just a few pages with a comic book clipping that’s frayed around the edges and scrawled notes from the fragments of memory.

Steve’s birthday was the fourth of July. His mom’s name was Sarah, and his dad’s name was Joseph. He used to wear newspapers in his shoes when he was scrawny and scrappy and too small for the fists that he swung and the words that he hurled. There would be some blustery winter nights where Bucky would swear black and blue that Steve wouldn’t make it to the morning, that his pneumonia would get the best of him. But Steve Rogers was nothing if not a fighter. His dad died in the Great War, before Steve got to meet him. He was the kind of boy who shared kettle corn with girls instead of flirting. He couldn’t dance to save his soul, and he let Bucky drag him on double dates with girls who couldn’t spare him a look. Steve was the kind of boy, even from the beginning, that Bucky knew was meant for greater things than war. 

Somehow war is where they’ve both ended up, where they’ve both built their tombstones and dug their graves.

Europe is different from what he remembers, from a continent torn by war. He reads about the camps in a library in Switzerland, and gets on a train to Poland the next day. _Arbei Macht Frei_ is scrawled across the top in iron letters, and Bucky suddenly feels like he wants to tear this place to the ground. There had been murmurings throughout the war of what the Nazis were doing, of what the Third Reich was doing to its own people. They had been so outlandish, so unimaginable, that most of the men thought of them as little more than rumblings through the higher-ups. But these places, these camps, the people in mass graves – they were all real at one point. They all lived and breathed and walked and talked. And that wrought iron sign that marks the entrance, that sign stands as a testament to that.

He wanders through the bunks and chambers, traces the nail marks on the walls and the letters scratched into the wood of bunks. “Excuse me?” He asks a passing guide. “What does this mean?”

She glances at the words and nods, something tight in her gaze. “It’s old Russian.” She tells him. “It translates, roughly, to ‘if there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness.’” Something cold settles into his stomach and doesn’t leave for three days. 

It’s in Bucharest that he finds some semblance of peace. The city is sprawling and large and lights up like Fourth of July fireworks at night. But it’s the life that lies beyond the surface of the tourism that ensnares Bucky, because it reminds him of Steve in a way that’s almost bittersweet, in the wildness of it all.

When he was the Soldier, there were rules – never speak unless spoken to, always aim to kill, always have weapons hidden from view. Never ask for more than you deserved, and he deserved little more than a crib and plate of food. He knew to maim in spars but to kill in combat. He knew the difference between friend and enemy, knew that if the lines between these blurred or got tangled in his mind that his only responsibility was to follow his target.

The rules that he didn’t know about, as the Soldier, were scratched on notepads and jammed inside his folder for the next handler to read over. Some were simple things, like what not to call him and to never get too close if his arm hadn’t been properly restrained.

But there were others, as well. These were more urgent, more fleeting.

_DO NOT ALLOW SUBJECT OUT OF CRYO-FREEZE ON JULY FOURTH_

_DO NOT SHOW SUBJECT OLD PICTURE REELS OF THE WAR_

_DO NOT TREAT SUBJECT AS HUMAN_

Men are not born monsters. Bucky Barnes was not born a monster. He was born a boy with wild eyes and sticky fingers and a cheeky smile. He grew to a man with the same smirk but different eyes. The monster in him was manufactured on a lab table in Germany, was fed anger and lies and bitter hatred and allowed to curl up at the foot of someone’s bed and be trained and pulled and taught to shoot to kill.

In ways, the story of the Winter Soldier and Captain America intersect. Bucky learns to speak Romanian around jarring English and cold Russian, and he reads through books about the Captain and lines up the points where their lives meet. Everything about the men they are now seems to come from something not human, seems to come from a bottle. It is, perhaps, the most common part they share about life After the Fall.

He works his life out down to a routine, down to the familiar cracks and crevices of his little shoebox apartment in a shady part of town. The people in the apartment block give him wary glances, and then slow smiles, and then plates of Romanian food left outside his door when he starts to look ragged.

Every morning he runs until his bones ache. Every morning he runs until the world stops feeling so cold and calculating. He runs until the urge to wound stops making his fingertips tingle. Sometimes it doesn’t take long, but there are days where he’ll run for ten or fifteen or twenty miles and still feel like he’s off balance, like the world is tilting around him.

Bucharest is safe. Bucharest is beautiful. Bucharest lets him remember how it feels to be man instead of monster.

But the world is not Bucharest, and the world catches up to him.

The person in his apartment is familiar in a way that’s distant, cold and terrifying. “You’re Captain America.” He says, and every part of him screams _Steve-Steve-Steve-I remember you._

“I don’t do that anymore.” He says, stiff, and wants to believe that what flashes across the Captain’s eyes is belief instead of well-masked distrust. _I’m not him anymore,_ he wants to say, has to clench and unclench his fists until he forgets that he is more man than machine.

He calls Steve _Captain_ and watches as he flinches, and something flickers in the colors of his eyes. It’s gone almost as quickly as it came, but Bucky recognizes it – anger.

Maybe here, too, is where their stories intersect. Two men, stumbling blind and lost through whatever world they’ve been thrown into. Different names, different stories. Known as who they are and not who they were. Before the Serum, he was Steve Rogers, a plucky kid from Brooklyn with a sharp tongue and swinging fists to match. Before the Fall, he was Bucky Barnes, a notorious flirt with wide eyes and a quick smile and a tight fist around the upper part of Steve’s jacket.

Men are not born monsters. Monsters are made. Graves and monuments and memories are not meant for monsters.

When they finally get caught in that tunnel, their hands up and Steve’s hand wrapped around Bucky’s wrist, he has to stop himself from laughing out loud. It seems, in the time that he wasn’t paying attention, their roles have reversed in this game that they’re playing. As the cuffs are shackled onto him, as they’re tightened, Steve meets his gaze.

 _I’m with you till the end of the line,_ Bucky thinks, and can’t get his hands to stop shaking the whole ride through Berlin.

_“Longing. Rusted. Seventeen. Daybreak.”_

“No.” Bucky growls, pulling at the restraints. They don’t give.

“ _Furnace. Nine. Benign. Homecoming.”_

“Stop it.” His body feels cold. Everything feels cold. 

“ _One. Freight.”_  

Bucky Barnes breathes in, and the Winter Soldier breathes out. 

He knows the mechanics of war like nothing else. It feels second nature to become the Soldier, to slip on that second skin and hold tight. It’s been too long, and the Soldier is thirsty for blood, for vengeance. He wants to raze this place to the ground, wants to watch it burn. 

“You could at least recognize me.” A woman gasps, gripping at his metal fingers around the delicate skin of her throat, and he sees a child years ago in Russia with her same cold grey eyes. How interesting, he thinks numbly, the two sides that we’ve ended up on.

A gun aims for his face and a kick aims toward his stomach, and he deflects both. He looks up and sees Peggy, and then he sees Howard, and then nothing at all as the Soldier takes over and Bucky falls away.

The next time Bucky wakes up, he’s in an abandoned warehouse. He sees Steve and the falcon and his whole world tightens around him. He wants to ask how many people died when the Soldier woke up.

“This won’t end with all of us standing around holding hands and singing _Kumbaya_ , Steve.” The falcon snaps, where they think the Soldier can’t hear.

Bucky hears Steve sigh, something quiet and drawn out and tired. “You think I don’t know that?” He demands, and Bucky thinks of the first time that Steven Grant Rogers got denied from service, how angry and sharp he had been, but how defiant, too. “I know how this ends – I knew it when I started it.”

“Is he really worth all of this?”

There’s a ringing moment of silence as Bucky’s heart beats a staccato rhythm against his throat. “He is to me.” Steve whispers, barely audible, and Bucky forgets how to breathe.

In his dreams, Steve’s mouth is dripping bright red blood and Bucky has a hand around his throat. “You’re my friend.” He coughs out, splatters warm blood across Bucky’s cheek.

“You’re my mission.” The Soldier snarls and tightens until he sees the whites of the Captain’s eyes, until the grip on his arm goes slack.

Bucky wakes with a gasp to see Steve sat beside him, eyes closed and chest rising and falling evenly as he sleeps. In sleep, he looks young. He looks like when they were kids, wreaking havoc around Brooklyn, stupid and ignorant in selfish in their youth. Now they’re both older and more tired and worn down, but somewhere under all of this are those two kids from Brooklyn. 

“It doesn’t have to be this way.” Tony Stark says on the tarmac. Bucky thinks, _the last word your father said was your mother’s name_.

“Do you really think you can punch your way out of this one?” Natalia Romanova asks. Bucky thinks, _they stole your childhood from you; they made you into a weapon. You redeemed yourself – why can’t I?_

“You killed my father.” T’Challa says. Bucky thinks, _it wasn’t me, please believe me, I never meant to hurt anyone_.

“I don’t know if I’m worth all this, Steve.” Bucky says and thinks, _I gave my life for you in 1945, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat._

The Soldier knows the mechanics of war, but Bucky Barnes knows the mechanics of repentance.

The containment facility in Siberia makes his skin tingle, makes his hands feel hot with blood that isn’t his own. “S’alright, Buck.” Steve says lowly, and his own name sounds strange on the Captain’s tongue.

“I come in peace.” Tony Stark says, hands held up, and not twenty minutes later, he shoots to kill.

He’s pulling punches, and Steve is on the defensive, but they fight like they did in the war. They fight side-by-side, two steps away and two steps ahead of Tony.

“Do you remember them?” Tony demands.

“I remember them all.” Bucky Barnes answers, and gets a feeling in his chest like something has just curled up to die. The Soldier was never meant to show remorse. Maybe here, in this place where the Soldier was born, will be where it dies, all because he remembers the name of every person he killed.

“I’m sorry Tony,” Steve says around a mouthful of blood. “But he’s my friend.” 

Silence hangs thick and heavy, Tony replies, “so was I.” And Bucky moves before he’s even aware of it. Agony slices through him as he hits the ground and looks to see his arm lying on the concrete beside him. He glances up just in time to see something cold and furious flicker in Steve’s gaze, and then war bursts in front of him.

“Bucky. _Bucky_.”

He’s pulled to his feet and a strong, firm arm is hooked around his waist. A familiar weight supports him, and a familiar scent drifts around him. 

“That shield doesn’t belong to you!” Tony shouts, and the last thing Bucky hears is the clattering of metal hitting stone. 

“I don’t know if I’m worth all this, Steve.” Bucky murmurs as Steve hovers over him on the aircraft. “I don’t know if I’m worth losing your family.”

The look Steve gives him is a breath short of incredulous. “You _are_ my family.” 

It takes months of planning, begging, cajoling, for Steve to agree to putting Bucky back in cryo-freeze. By now, they’ve got Sam and Clint and Wanda in rooms around the Black Panther’s sprawling estate. By now, they’re all safe and unharmed and Clint’s wife and three children are running them all ragged. 

“He knows it’s for the best.” Sam – because now he’s _Sam_ and gets angry if Bucky calls him anything else – says one evening over a bottle of peach schnapps that tastes unlike anything Bucky has ever tasted before. “But I think he’s struggling to equate it to just getting you back again.”

43 days into their stay, and Steve relents. 

The last thing James Buchanan Barnes sees is his best friend’s face, the tight lines around Steve’s eyes and mouth and the small smile and the way he stands.

 _I’m with you till the end of the line_ , he thinks as ice creeps over his body, as his breath freezes in his chest. And then he thinks nothing at all.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> p.s. the quote from the concentration camp was actually found in Mauthausen and not Auschwitz, but was a legitimate quote that's believed to have been written by a Russian in the camp


End file.
